In a recent post by Jeremy Mayes over at PPC Discussions he took a critical look at the Google Suggest tool. We talked just yesterday about the importance of getting specific with your keywords so that you are not wasting money on an overly expensive and overly sought-after keyword or phrase.

Using key phrases instead of single, highly-competitive keywords is good SEO strategy that gives you more 'bang for your buck'. But how can you maximize the effectiveness of your key phrases? One easy and effective way to do this is with local search terms. If your key phrase is "flower delivery" then you can make it even more targeted by inserting your local terms: "flower delivery Atlanta". There you've just exponentially increased the effectiveness of your search campaign by approaching from the angle of local search.

A common mistake people make when optimizing their content pages is focusing on a whole list of keywords instead of just one. The best course of action is to focus on one really good keyword per content page and build everything around it. This looks better to the search engines and makes it easier for you to create the content in a way that is very relevant to the keyword or phrase you are trying to capture.

Sometimes the keywords you are trying to rank for are too competitive. Why not look at plural versions of those keywords? The good thing about plurals is that you can rank for both plural and singular versions of that word. This is a great way to maximize your efforts without spending too much time/money competing for that target keyword that everyone else wants.

When you're really trying to focus on a specific keyword the actual place it appears on your web page makes a difference and as a rule of thumb: the earlier the better. Some SEO practitioners have had success placing the keyword at the top of the page in bold and in large font. This prominence signals to the search engines that this word or phrase plays an important role on your page.

Just as you should avoid using the stop words we talked about yesterday in your meta tags, you should also avoid repeating your keywords. If your website is about celebrity gossip it might make sense to you to have the keywords 'celebrity gossip' and 'celebrity news' both included. This would make sense to a human but meta tags are not written for humans, they are written for robots and the search engines will penalize you for repeating the word 'celebrity'.